Take
by Mia Shade
Summary: A film that records a gory murder leads the team into the world of extreme horror films, a genre that is known to cross lines...possibly into murder for entertainment. Is this movie the first real snuff film ever created, and who's in the director's seat?
1. One

Take

By Mia Shade

Summary: A film that records a terrifyingly gory murder leads the team into Hollywood and its fascination with extreme horror, a genre that is known to cross lines--possibly into murder for profit. Is this the first real snuff film ever created?

Disclaimer: Criminal Minds is not mine.

**A/N:** Well, my friends, I'm back. Summer is often a time of writer's block for me, and after struggling like hell to come up with another _Dose_-type introspective piece, I realized that a casefic would get me back on track, and so here we are. I once again acknowledge Chuck Palahniuk for the inspiration for parts of my writing style; those of you who have read _Invisible Monsters_ will recognize what I mean.

As usual, I love feedback and reviews. I'll have the second chapter up in a few days.

I am not including Gideon in this piece for obvious reasons. The events of season 2's finale are irrelevant here, so assume that all is well and Gideon has taken his leave already.

* * *

"The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it…" – **Jean-Luc Godard, French filmmaker**

--

Imagine your life as a movie.

Each time the door closes, each time your heart beats and there's that moment when it could very well stop, the director in your head yells _cut_!

Another heartbeat. Another scene. Another _cut_.

Everyone else is just an actor, working the character they've been given as an alternative to waiting tables at the high-end restaurants that pay less than the fast-food joints.

Everyone is just acting. Just putting on a ruse in order to survive.

That's why we like the movies. People putting on a ruse who are putting on a ruse—it's a double negative that makes a movie different from real life, more honest or more deceitful, but always something more.

More romantic.

More tragic.

More action-packed.

More witty.

In fact, there is only one area in which the real-life ruse wins out over movies, and that is death.

At the moment that the life leaves their body, everyone drops the act.

And that real real life—that is more terrifying than any horrific thing that can be imagined on the screen.

--

(_STOP!_)

Her hand on the remote hits the _pause_ button so suddenly that she almost doesn't realize she's done it.

The film stops just as a hooded figure finishes with the girl, his knife glinting in the greenish night vision light as he steps away from the sorry little puddle that used to be a human being.

In that illumination all of the blood looks brown.

_(they used chocolate syrup to simulate blood in the shower scene in _Psycho)

Her heart beating at a million miles. Countless little sharp _cut-cut-cut-cut-cut-cut-cut_ moments.

The director in her head is silent, as shocked as she is.

Jennifer Jareau tries to rise from her chair, but her arms are frozen in place and she feels like there's a magnet pulling her chest back, flattening her against the backrest.

_Ohmygod._

Frozen in shock, paused, left pulsing on the edge of movement.

Waiting for the next action, for the start of the next scene. For the camera angles to be just right in order to make her proper entrance.

And JJ can't move.

For the first time in months, she's afraid, scared like back when she was fourteen and on her first date and went to see some incarnation of Freddy Krueger and her date's hand had been sweaty and no comfort and she had slept with the light on for weeks.

Monsters.

Nightmares.

JJ punches a button on her phone, waits for the pickup, and manages to choke out seven words:

"Hotch, everyone needs to see this. Now."

He knows her well enough that she doesn't need to say anything more.

Either that, or the director cuts the scene just before she says it.

--

**Transcript: Scene 7 of "Valentine's Day", director unknown; actors unknown; distributor****: Canary Dog Productions****; courtesy of 24 Hour Entertainment Video**

**INT: Grey concrete room with no windows; a BRUNETTE GIRL is sitting on the floor, chained by wrist shackles to the ground. **

**GIRL: **_**(sobbing)**_** Please, please…(**_**garbled**_**)…p-please **_**(pulls at her chains, causing them to rattle)**_

**MALE VOICE: (**_**off-screen, synthesized)**_** Do you want to go home?**

**GIRL: I promise I won't tell anyone what you look like! I won't tell anyone where I was! I'll be good! I'll be good! I'll be good!**

**MALE VOICE: **_**laughs) **_**Sure.**

**GIRL: I promise! **_**(begins to laugh)**_** See? See? I won't tell anyone that I saw! **_**(raises her head up, arching it back; she pulls her chains taught and then throws her head forward over them. A wet splat is heard)**_

**MALE VOICE: Wow, look at her jump! **_**(laughs)**_

**GIRL: (**_**raises her head to the camera, showing that the chains have gouged out her eyes; still giggling softly) **_**I didn't see…I didn't see…I didn't see…I didn't see…I didn't see…(**_**repeats for three minutes, twenty-seven seconds)**_

**MALE VOICE: Well, if you want to leave me that badly, I suppose I could help you along…**

--

"Wait—pause it. And tell me."

JJ's gulp of dread is nearly imperceptible, and in response to Hotch's order she clicks her remote, and the tape stops just as a hooded figure enters the frame from the left. The glint of the knife he holds is frozen in time on the screen, a nightmare always just about to come true.

JJ's still shaking. She's seen it. She knows what's about to happen.

(_take a deep breath, and speak._)

"We received this tape from the LAPD, who got it from a Hollywood area video store, 24 Hour Entertainment Video," she explains. "It's a small store, mainly dealing in VHS tapes, and they also have a collection of independent and adult films. They claim to have received this in the mail four days ago from a new production company. The girl onscreen has been identified as twenty-two-year-old Erin Stokes, an aspiring actress and hostess at a Hollywood area restaurant who has been missing for seven weeks."

Hotch's eyes don't waver from the screen; out of the corner of her eyes, JJ sees Reid raise his coffee cup halfway to his mouth and then put it back down, his thirst gone.

Garcia's eyes are hidden behind her hands.

Morgan's face is stony and Prentiss' mouth is open slightly in shock—and they haven't even gotten to the worst part.

"And this production company…" Hotch prompts, impatient.

"The production company does not have an official address, and the phone number it provided to the store was a dead line. It was once a cell phone number but is no longer in use," JJ continues. Her heart feels dead in her chest, a limp black thing rotting there.

She begins the tape again and, when everyone else is watching, she turns away. She's seen it. Now, she hears it, and the audio alone is the stuff of nightmares.

The sound of the knife ripping through Erin's skin.

Her screams.

Her laughter.

That final, disturbing silence that is not silence, because through the stillness is the gurgle of blood as the killer steps through the pool of it on the floor as he exits to the left.

_What demented god created this?_

Garcia begins to cry silently at some point after the dismembering begins. The rest of the team watches in shock.

When the film cuts to black, Hotch turns back to face everyone else; JJ sees that the colour has completely drained from his face.

"But—there's never been a documented case of one," Reid's protest is soft. Hotch nods.

"I know," he replies. "And let's hope that this is just a very good horror film."

Reid adjusts his glasses. "It's so obvious—so conspicuously placed. It has to be a fake. Anyone making something real wouldn't be nearly so bold as to send them to a video store."

Prentiss' brow furrows. "What?"

Hotch sighs. "If this film is not a fake, then we may be looking at the very first snuff film to be purposefully released into the public."

"But we've seen films of people being murdered," Prentiss' eyes stray for a moment to Reid. "Lots of murderers have killed people onscreen."

Nobody sees how Reid and JJ's eyes meet.

How they both know it's a lie Prentiss is telling. In recent memory there was only Tobias.

"Most, if not all, have used the idea of a camera as a warning. As a tool," Reid says softly, his eyes flicking away from JJ to focus on the group. "For them, the camera is simply a medium to spread their message, which was the killing. For a snuff film, the murder itself is the medium. The art form."

Hotch turns back to the screen. "Somebody may have murdered this girl for the express purpose of catching the act of killing on film."

Garcia's voice is soft.

"The ultimate horror movie," is all she says.


	2. Two

**A/N:** The response to the first chapter was delightful; I'm always nervous when I post a new story and I feel extremely happy to know that it went over well. I'm sorry this took so long to come; I moved to another province and started school, so things have been crazy and I got blocked.

The expert here is not actually based on anyone real. He's a fictional character, but I am crediting real movies to him for dramatic effect.

THERE IS A CONTENT WARNING ON THIS CHAPTER. It's going to get gruesome, folks. I hope nobody will get too scared, but this is a horror story. I mean to shock. Enjoy!

* * *

"You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you." - **Eric Hoffer**

--**  
**

**Transcript: Scene 1 of "Valentine's Day"**

**GIRL: (**_**opens her eyes and screams**_**) What do you want? What do you want, you son of a bitch?**

**MALE VOICE: (**_**off-screen, synthesized**_**) I just want to watch you. You're so beautiful.**

**GIRL: Shut up!**

**MALE VOICE: Come on, do a little dance for me. We've got all the time in the world.**

**GIRL: (**_**lunges at the camera but is held back by her chains, which snap and rattle**_**) I'll get you for this! I know who you are! You're—(**_**garbled**_

**MALE VOICE: Silly little girl. Don't you know that I can manipulate everything I catch on this film? Nothing you say can save you. Nothing you do can save you, because I'll just edit it out.**

**GIRL: (**_**screams**_**) SHUT UP!**

--

JJ opens her eyes.

Sitting in the last seat at the end of the fuselage, sitting with her back turned away.

The director in her mind is screaming for everyone to shut up a minute—how ironic.

Stereo headphones, borrowed, covering her ears. She has on some sort of rock music but she's not sure exactly what it is; at this point, she doesn't really care. She just doesn't want to hear that film again, even inside her head.

Staring into the dark, with dread clawing its cold way up her throat.

Something within JJ's chest whips against her ribs, so fast that it's almost a hum or (_cutcutcutcutcutcutcutcutcut_) too fast to follow.

"JJ?"

Somehow she manages not to scream in terror at the light touch of a hand on her shoulder.

Hotch sits down in front of her, his face rendered in the sort of look that JJ knows means that he's concerned about something but doesn't want to show it.

She wonders how she knows so much about a man that she doesn't really know at all.

"JJ, I want to remind you that you're up for evaluation when we get back to Quantico," Hotch says softly, an introduction to something else she's not sure of.

JJ nods. _I give you the delights of bureaucracy, ladies and gentlemen._

She knows there's nothing for her to worry about. She pissed off the board a few months ago when she effectively told them to shove their notions about her where the sun didn't shine, but everything was reconciled--at roughly the same time that she began sleeping through the night again.

Funny thing.

And in all of that musing JJ realizes that she's completely missed what Hotch just said.

"Pardon?"

He swallows. "JJ, I've recommended to the director that you be trained for a profiler's position on this team."

The director in JJ's head screams _Who put that in the script??_

She just says "Oh."

Hotch's eyes betray nothing. "You've been with us for long enough that you'd only need six months of additional training, and--" he falters.

The vacancy left by Gideon is suddenly a vacuum between them--one that JJ suddenly feels pressured to fill.

"Hotch, I'm already a member of the team," she replies. "I've told you--"

"--I know you said no a little while ago, but think about it again," Hotch interrupts, placing his hand over hers reassuringly. "I think that you would make an extremely good profiler--and that will go on the record."

They watch each other for a moment while JJ thinks.

She can't imagine why she feels a compelling reason to say no, to run away until Hotch hires another profiler, to keep with the status quo and never change.

Her first thought is how Erin Stokes screamed like a pig as the unsub peeled the skin from her forehead, pulling the eyelids from her empty eye sockets away with it.

Far more disturbing is the memory of the sheer vacancy of Reid's eyes in the months following his incident with Tobias Henkel.

That is what happens when you're a profiler--

But for some reason she just doesn't feel like saying _no_.

_Oh, god, I don't know why I don't know._

JJ gulps, silently. Could she handle having the Erins of the world scream inside her head for the rest of her life while she tried in vain to save them?

Can she handle sitting back and just letting them scream without doing more to help?

Finally she nods.

"I'll think about it, Hotch." A nice neutral reply, one that satisfies him enough to nod back and return to his original seat, leaving her alone again.

The mental director is running around in a minor panic, wondering where the hell the writers of this inane script have disappeared to.

JJ closes her eyes and starts the music in her headphones again.

Hollywood is still two hours away and it's ten at night.

Over the pounding drums and guitar licks she can hear someone screaming.

--

**Transcript: Scene 3 of "Valentine's Day"**

**GIRL: (**_**shakily singing**_**) ...get no satisfaction, I try and I try and I try and I try and I tr…..can't get...ge….(**_**garbled**_

--

JJ, in the Los Angeles FBI field office, looks around the room and feels overwhelmed by technology.

_This must be how the abacus feels when the computer comes along to claim it._

Out of place. Out of time. Outdated and outside.

Smack dab in the middle of everything.

She's still mildly reeling from the time change, from it being past one a.m. in Virginia but still only nine at night in L.A. They landed just over an hour ago, and immediately split up: Morgan and Reid are taking the ninety-minute drive to Erin Stokes' parents' house, and Hotch and Prentiss are going to the video store.

And JJ is here, sitting in a dark room facing a large projection screen on the wall that fills most of her central vision, on which the tape is playing in a continuous loop. Behind her is a table filled with all sorts of unnamed materials and gadgets, examples of special effects. Fake blood recipes and eyeballs and severed hands and knives of all sizes. Here to see if the tape could be a fake.

At JJ's left is a rail-thin, jaundiced wisp of a man, a Mike Collins, who barely shook her hand before asking to see the tape, his eagerness a hairsbreadth from crossing the line between the need of an expert to begin a fascinating new puzzle and the too-familiar cover story of a suspect inserting himself into the investigation.

Or maybe she's just getting paranoid.

Mike Collins, Special Effects Master. The secret weapon. Eli Roth, Leigh Whannell, Greg Mclean, John Stockwell; they all drool at the thought of Collins working for them. He is their Holy Grail, their ticket to the big show. He's the one who hacked off a foot in the first _Saw_ movie. All those buckets of blood, he did those.

This horror pornography. This gore as extreme sport, this is his calling. His baby. His love.

He watches Erin Stokes die with a delighted glint in his eye.

"Oh, this is good," he rasps, a voice ruined by excessive caffeine and god knows what else. "This is too good. This is goddamn _wizardry_."

JJ sighs. The darkness of the room is beginning to prickle her skin. "Do you know how it's done?"

Out of the corner of her eye, blown to _King-Kong _proportions, the unsub is carefully slicing along the side of Erin's fingers, around under the fingernail and down the other side, and peeling the skin away from each of her fingers like a banana. Collins squirms in his seat, types a few things into the keyboard and the image of Erin freezes, her eye sockets empty, silently shrieking in pain. He frowns.

"Give me your hand for a moment, please," he asks. The thought repulses JJ but she complies anyway; her fingers look long and elegant compared to the spindly knuckles that take them.

Collins holds her gaze for a moment, her hand suspended between them, and one eyebrow rises a bit. "You may want to close your eyes."

JJ, feeling dizzy in the dark with only the greenish glow of the film to light them, can't complain with that suggestion. Whether it's for her own peace of mind or because Collins doesn't want her finding out his secrets, she doesn't know.

The director in her head says, _Give me suppressed nausea, and--action._

Her hand is submerged in something cold and sticky and slimy, something with little tiny lumps and strings in it. JJ's free hand, resting on her thigh, tightens and tightens until she feels the skin underneath her skirt bruise.

Collins is silent as he works, and with her eyes closed JJ can only guess what he's doing to her. Things wrap around her fingers, slip over her palm--they coat and cut and tie and squeeze until she stops trying to guess what's happening and just focuses on her breath.

"Done."

JJ's eyes take a full minute to adjust from the darkness in her head to the darkness in the room, and when she looks down at her hand it looks--normal.

It feels a little heavier than usual, like she's wearing a glove, but it looks the same.

Collins raises a good-sized knife that glitters in the green light, matching exactly the dangerous sparkle in his eyes, and, leaning forward, takes a small piece of JJ's hair in his hand and cuts an inch off the end. The knife slides through the strands like water. Proof that it's sharp.

The director in JJ's head says: _this is not a test._

She says: _oh god._

"Don't move," Collins orders, and before JJ can say another word he presses the knife to the side of her index finger and slices it from base to tip.

Her heart drops to her toes as she watches a long rounded line of blood slowly emerge from the wound, and when it pops and blood begins to drip to the floor around her feet JJ can only stare and stare and stare.

Collins pushes her index and middle fingers apart and carves the rest of the way around her finger, exactly like the unsub in the film. JJ watches him as he carefully sets the knife down on the table, wipes away some of the blood with his fingers--and then, ever so gently, Mike Collins peels the skin away from JJ's finger, letting the flaps settle against her hand.

She can see the muscles of her finger, blood peeking out from every crevice and cranny, raw and naked like a newborn dead thing.

Her heartbeat roars in her ears.

No pain.

No pain.

Then she understands.

_Oh my god._

JJ meets Collins' eyes and he starts to laugh. He reaches over and rubs the naked muscle and raw flesh, rubbing until the red paint and latex and fake blood comes away to reveal her real finger underneath.

Untouched. Unharmed. Stained with red dye.

A fake hand built over JJ's own, a new layer of flesh and muscle and tendon and skin. In the greenish glow from the film's screen it's nearly undetectable.

Collins takes the knife and cuts the rest of the fake hand off, pulling it away in two big pieces. JJ watches him, as he begins to scrape the thin layer of fake muscle off with a scapula.

"How did you--"

"--this was just a quick example. If I'd had more time it wouldn't have felt so heavy," Collins balls the fake flesh, rolling it between his palms. "You should have seen your face."

JJ blinks. "Well," she says, "Are you saying that at least some of it is faked, then?"

Collins offers her a bucket of warm water, and JJ begins to scrub off the last of the fake blood. He turns back to the film, fingers tapping, rewinding the film to the moment when Erin finally dies.

"Some of it could be faked, yes."

JJ pulls her hand from the water and wipes it on a nearby cloth, turning back to the film. "What?"

Collins rewinds again and the two of them watch the only part of the film that still makes JJ shudder.

The unsub takes a pair of autopsy shears, huge silver suckers, and slips the bottom blade into Erin's stomach, like slicing through soft butter. She screams as the shears go _snip-CRACK_, as ribs crunch and separate, until her chest is displayed wide open for the camera.

With the sound off, Erin's face looks like the moon, three wide-open black holes in her face.

She doesn't actually die for another thirty seconds or so.

The director in JJ's head says: _oh, no, anything but that one._

Collins sighs, frustrated, gesturing to the screen. "There are a few things in there that I've known since infancy, but this…this one is too much. I don't know how they could have done it. You can't layer a chest cavity, like I did with your hand. It's too difficult. He cut off her breasts before, did you see? It's all almost too real. I'd love to know how he did it, though; he almost tops me."

"Green screen effect?" JJ croaks. Collins rolls his eyes.

"Not a chance," he scoffs. "You may be the fancy-schmancy psychologist, Agent, but I'm in this business and I know the people who are in it. This sort of a film...well, it's what we call a gallery movie. A film that someone makes to show off how good they are, what sort of new effect they've thought up. It's meant for others who work in the horror film business, traded back and forth. It's an art, these effects; you do not cheat it by using computers."

The first thing JJ thinks of is that pornography rings do the same thing. The nameless faces of children she's tried to save flash by in her mind, as if the director is yelling, _Montage!_

Collins watches the unsub step away from Erin's broken doll body. "I don't know the person who did this, but I know that he's showing off in a major way. He's thought up something brand new and he's too much of an extremist to just fake it with computer generated special effects," he sighs. "God, I wish I knew how he did it. It must be something that nobody's thought of before."

JJ is tempted to reply, _Yes, because nobody's thought of murder before_, but her cell's chirping interrupts the idea. She turns away from the screen and picks up.

"JJ?" Morgan's voice, and he doesn't seem too happy.

"Yeah?"

"Can you get some officers and meet us at the Los Angeles Garbage Dump?"

JJ's throat closes up. "Oh god."

"'Oh god' is right," Morgan replies. "Somebody just found a body."


End file.
